Educational Insights
Design Being: Towards an Embodied Perspective of Design Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Timothy Wee
This pedagogical theory is framed by play, employing embodied cognition as a medium to teach the principles of design. In this paper, I am proposing that the activity of bouldering can be a tool that develops a deeper understanding of a variety of design principles. Play is often thought as frivolous, its pedagogical potential often relegated to early childhood education. This study argues that it can be a transformative force for accommodating existing knowledge through novel experiences for students to realise their creative potential. By integrating design practice with bouldering, the body is instrumentalised, translating the movements of the eye on a page into the movements of the body on the wall. Students merge thoughts with actions, externalising thinking by spatialising information in order to cultivate new modes of conceptualisation. This study employs a hybrid of Participatory Action Research and Design Thinking to first gather information from both design and bouldering communities, which were synthesised to develop an intervention, qualitative data was collected and analysed to gain insights into the experiences of the participants. This transdisciplinary approach to design education seeks to liberate students from their stationary desk/screen bound environment, allowing for a critical review and examination on how they can access new forms of knowledge/ways of learning. Thus, transforming their understanding of themselves and their perspectives in order to reclaim the human value within design practice.
Stories from Our Wardrobe: Developing 21st Century Competencies through Storytelling, Zines and Exhibition Making View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pixie Tan
This paper revisits "Stories from Our Wardrobe", an action-research addressing the challenges of facilitating student collaborations and fostering design exploration among diploma design students. Employing storytelling, zines, and exhibition-making, the research aims to cultivate designers ready for the challenges of the 21st century. It references and challenges Singapore’s Ministry of Education's framework of 21st-century competencies, which aspires to develop students who are active contributors, self-directed learners, and confident individuals. Beyond an industry-focused curriculum, it proposes classroom conditions that promote mutual learning, adaptability, collaboration, and exploration. Drawing from a diverse source of qualitative data from student surveys, interviews, and reflections, the research advocates for a shift towards engaged pedagogy in design education. This paradigm values personal narratives as integral to the learning experience and presents the possibility of harnessing them to design culturally relevant curricula. The initiative encourages students outside of dominant fashion narratives to tell new, authentic stories that resonate with diverse and global audiences. It seeks to empower students to critically engage with their cultural contexts and develop a deeper understanding of their own creative processes. By shifting the culture within diploma education, which often values commercial outcomes over reflective introspection, this approach fosters educational practices that inspire a new generation of learners to make an impact in the future fashion industry. The project highlights the importance of creating a supportive learning environment that encourages experimentation, personal growth, and the development of a unique creative voice.
Equity-Centered Design Thinking Approach to Transforming Education Systems and Policies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Akhil Babu
This research focuses on understanding existing education systems and policies to evaluate and refine strategies that support design as a practice. It addresses the challenge of incremental additions to systems that often lack clarity and a quantified understanding of how effectively design is integrated into new frameworks. Using the Equity-Centered Design Thinking (ECDT) approach, the study emphasizes the proactive definition and hypothesis of new methods for evaluating systemic perspectives in design, fostering adaptable methodologies tailored to diverse educational contexts. The research synthesizes effective global frameworks, including Enterprise Design Thinking (EDT), Agile, and Research Operations, to refine ECDT’s application in introducing and scaling design practices. The implications of this study aim to empower key user groups, such as teachers and students, by promoting individuality and equity in knowledge absorption through design-driven methods. The ECDT framework offers a structured approach to restructuring pre-existing policies and systems, enabling them to accommodate and embrace innovative understandings and methods for future-ready education systems.
MAPArts: Memory Enhanced by Art and Design View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elaine Brodie
MAPArts is an interdisciplinary research program that teaches the fundamentals of design and basic art-making skills to seniors who are concerned about changes in their memory. It was created as a collaboration between myself, a professor in the faculty of Animation, Art & Design, and Dr. Dupuis, a professor and clinical neuroscientist, from Sheridan College in Canada. Our participants had no formal art training and no formal diagnosis of cognitive impairment, as determined by a screening questionnaire. The program integrates embodied art-making with an existing, clinically proven “Memory and Aging Program” (MAP), developed by Baycrest Heath Sciences in Toronto, Canada. The goal of our research was to discover if adding visual interpretation and art-making, linked to Baycrest’s teachings, would enhance participants’ retention of memory-enhancing skills. We used pre and post intervention surveys as well as a six-week follow-up session to test our program’s results, which were then compared to Baycrest’s, which were collected in similar surveys. Our participants’ memory and continuing adoption of the skills taught six weeks after the program ended were significantly higher (by about 19%) than Baycrest’s own data for their program. Given the number of aging baby boomers, this research suggests potential benefits for an enormous number of seniors. However, additional funding has proven difficult, so far.
